


all twisted

by coloredink



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-11
Updated: 2006-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:46:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Humes have short lives, and their sights are short as well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all twisted

I. Vaan

The first time Vaan saw snow, he forgot entirely about their quest.

Larsa showed them how to make snow butterflies by lying on their backs spreadeagled and waving their limbs, while Balthier demonstrated the art of the perfect snowball (with Basch as the unsuspecting target). Then Vaan and Penelo argued over what kind of sculpture to make, until somehow it got into their heads to make a snow viera.

"I do not quite see the resemblence," Fran said, when they were done. Next to her, Balthier coughed and looked away, hand over his mouth.

"See, the branches are the ears," Vaan tried to explain. "And Penelo did the eyes and the mouth with pebbles--"

They were interrupted by a cough from Ashe, who was squinting up at the foggy sun. "The quiescence does us good, but we must continue."

Larsa, nodding agreement, wiped his hands against his trousers. "My apologies. It's true that at the moment, time is of the essence."

"What? Oh, right!" Vaan dusted the snow off his hands. "We're going to go see the whosit, the Grand Killus. And stop the war."

"If only t'would be so simple," Ashe murmured.

For a bunch of adventurers, Vaan thought, sometimes they were no fun at all.

\---

II. Penelo

The first time Penelo successfully cast a spell, Fran gave her a mace.

She felt its awkward weight in her hands, ran her fingers gently over the blunt spikes at its tip, so different from the little dagger she'd carried since youth to protect herself against the thousand tiny dangers that imperiled her in Lowtown and the Sands. "Why?"

"You are a mage," Fran said in her slow, clipped way. "I see this."

Penelo's grip tightened around the handle of her new weapon. "A mage?" she squeaked.

Fran cocked her head. "This troubles you?"

"No! No. Wow." Penelo looked down at the mace, then up at Fran. "A mage? Really?"

"I feel the magicks are strong within you," said Fran. "Rods, staves, maces, these make the magicks stronger."

Ever since their youth, Vaan had always been the one with the grand ideas. Vaan was going to become a sky pirate, Vaan was going to revenge himself on the Empire, while Penelo was always going to wake up in the room behind the shop with another list of errands to run that day beside her pillow. She found it difficult to believe, even now, that they were on some sort of quest, the stuff legends were made of, like the stories Migelo used to read to the younger children.

Penelo thought of the look on Vaan's face when she showed up in the next battle with a mace in her hand, and the grin tugging at the corners of her mouth was not entirely without malice.

\---

III. Basch

The first time Basch sat down to a real meal after his return from the Nalbina dungeons, he wasn't able to eat it.

"You take this," said Old Dalan, handing Basch a bowl of stew and rice, "and you eat it slowly, and alone."

Basch knew better than to argue, for he'd seen prisoners kept on too little food. The body stopped looking to the stomach for nourishment after a time, consuming flesh and fat instead; Basch had grown lean and weak in prison, nearly unable to protect himself against bats that once would have fallen to one swift cleave of his blade. He needed to learn to eat again.

The stew was delicious, seasoned with two long years of bread and gruel and water, and he relished the spices on his tongue, the robust flavor of the meat. He made it through seven bites of the stew before choking on the eighth. He chewed and swallowed with great difficulty, the meat suddenly tasteless and too fleshy in his mouth. Then he took a ninth bite, then a tenth, and on the eleventh he had to stop to bend over the waste bin and heave up what he'd worked so hard to gain.

Basch wiped his mouth and sat for a moment, crosslegged, regaining his breath. Then he picked up his bowl and his spoon and took another bite.

\---

IV. Balthier

The first time Balthier honestly had to worry about gil was after he'd begun ferrying about a certain ex-princess.

Balthier knelt beside the fallen zombie and thrust his hand into its sunken chest cavity. The corpse was sagging and melting away already, empty of the magicks that had once animated it, but. . . ah.

"What are you doing?" Vaan demanded with a grimace.

"I'd fain to know as well," Basch said, an incredulous lift to his brow.

"Fetid flesh fetches a pretty coin at the bazaar," Balthier said, removing two strips of dark, foul-smelling meat from the zombie and dropping it into one of his numerous pouches. He'd have to throw that pouch away, once they were done, but it would be worth it. "We're not leaving this behind."

"But it stinks!" Vaan backed away.

"Just for that," Balthier said calmly, slinging the little leather bag at Vaan's chest, "you get to carry it."

Fran was kind enough to wait until the others were farther ahead, Vaan's voice echoing through the deserted chambers that the bag reeked, this was unfair, and he could not believe that this was happening to him.

"You would never take it before," she murmured.

"Never needed the gil so badly before," Balthier replied. "Honestly, sometimes I think I should never have left home."

\---

V. Ashe

The first time Ashe took off her husband's ring, she did not truly expect it back.

But in the end, it changed nothing. She lies with one hand in the grave, wrapped 'round her husband's fingers. Rasler is a hole in her that will never heal, still jagged and bleeding at the edges, and all she can think to staunch it is revenge. Rasler would disapprove, for there was much nobility in him, but nobility did not shield him, and it will not shield her either, and so she gave the ring to the sky pirate. He claimed he would keep it until he found something more valuable, but to her there is nothing more valuable save the death of the Empire that killed her husband and shackled her kingdom.

So the pirate took her piece of Rasler, and he took a piece of her with it, and all that is left is the hunger and all that she wants is revenge. Her husband is pale and flaccid in his burial armor, in the palace crypt where she cannot go anymore because the Empire took that away from her as well. But she took the ring from Rasler's cold, stiff finger and warmed it in her palm whilst they put him away, and not even her father knew, and then the Empire took him from her, and then the pirate took him from her.

Revenge bears no fruit, but nor will you and I bear any fruit now, my prince, and now the only fruit Dalmasca bears is the Empire's, and vengeance is my only child.

These roles we play. I will play mine.

Would you still have no other, Rasler? Would you? I gave you to the pirate and the pirate took you from me and now I must go with him. I would have no other.

\---

VI. Fran

The first time Fran met her partner's father, she put an arrow through his eye.

Or, at least, she attempted to. The man was spry and robust for his age--or perhaps he was not so old; she did, oftentimes, have difficulty estimating humes' ages--and the spheres that whirled around him deflected all their strikes. But they were simple enough to fell, and Cid himself was only a hume, no matter how much he surrounded himself with "toys." It seemed they would succeed, but then Venat appeared.

Some time afterward, Balthier asked her, "Well, what did you think? Of my old man."

"His mind is twisted," she said.

You are all twisted, she did not say. It is simply that some are more twisted than others. Humes have short lives, and your sights are short as well. You do not live long enough to see that the world, she never truly changes. This craving for power, it is because you wish to live longer, but your minds are too short.

But this is where you and your father differ, for you run from power.

"Ah, but I suspect you think we are all twisted, to an extent," Balthier said, not without affection.

Fran inclined her head. "The nethicite, it has done this to him," she said. "He is poisoned with it. So it seems with all those who touch it."

"Ah. Well." Balthier said nothing for a few moments, as was his wont, and it was easy, comfortable. "And now."

"We fly," said Fran.

"What else?"


End file.
